The Australian swag fashion is the easiest way in the world of
carrying a load. I ought to know something about carrying loads: I've
carried babies, which are the heaviest and most awkward and
heartbreaking loads in this world for a boy or man to carry, I fancy.
God remember mothers who slave about the housework (and do sometimes a
man's work in addition in the bush) with a heavy, squalling kid on one
arm! I've humped logs on the selection, “burning-off,” with loads of
fencing-posts and rails and palings out of steep, rugged gullies (and
was happier then, perhaps); I've carried a shovel, crowbar, heavy
“rammer,” a dozen insulators on an average (strung round my shoulders
with raw flax)-to say nothing of soldiering kit, tucker-bag, billy and
climbing spurs—all day on a telegraph line in rough country in New
Zealand, and in places where a man had to manage his load with one hand
and help himself climb with the other; and I've helped hump and drag
telegraph-poles up cliffs and sidings where the horses couldn't go.
I've carried a portmanteau on the hot dusty roads in green old jackaroo
days. Ask any actor who's been stranded and had to count railway
sleepers from one town to another! he'll tell you what sort of an
awkward load a portmanteau is, especially if there's a broken-hearted
man underneath it. I've tried knapsack fashion—one of the least
healthy and most likely to give a man sores; I've carried my belongings
in a three-bushel sack slung over my shoulder—blankets, tucker, spare
boots and poetry all lumped together. I tried carrying a load on my
head, and got a crick in my neck and spine for days. I've carried a
load on my mind that should have been shared by editors and publishers.
I've helped hump luggage and furniture up to, and down from, a top flat
in London. And I've carried swag for months out back in Australia—and
it was life, in spite of its “squalidness” and meanness and
wretchedness and hardship, and in spite of the fact that the world
would have regarded us as “tramps”—and a free life amongst men
from all the world!

The Australian swag was born of Australia and no other land—of the
Great Lone Land of magnificent distances and bright heat; the land of
self-reliance, and never-give-in, and help-your-mate. The grave of many
of the world's tragedies and comedies—royal and otherwise. The land
where a man out of employment might shoulder his swag in Adelaide and
take the track, and years later walk into a hut on the Gulf, or never
be heard of any more, or a body be found in the bush and buried by the
mounted police, or never found and never buried—what does it matter?

The land I love above all others—not because it was kind to me, but
because I was born on Australian soil, and because of the foreign
father who died at his work in the ranks of Australian pioneers, and
because of many things. Australia! My country! Her very name is music
to me. God bless Australia! for the sake of the great hearts of the
heart of her! God keep her clear of the old-world shams and social lies
and mockery, and callous commercialism, and sordid shame! And heaven
send that, if ever in my time her sons are called upon to fight for her
young life and honour, I die with the first rank of them and be buried
in Australian ground.

But this will probably be called false, forced or “maudlin
sentiment” here in England, where the mawkish sentiment of the
music-halls, and the popular applause it receives, is enough to make a
healthy man sick, and is only equalled by music-hall vulgarity. So I'll
get on.

In the old digging days the knapsack, or straps-across-the chest
fashion, was tried, but the load pressed on a man's chest and impeded
his breathing, and a man needs to have his bellows free on long tracks
in hot, stirless weather. Then the “horse-collar,” or rolled military
overcoat style—swag over one shoulder and under the other arm—was
tried, but it was found to be too hot for the Australian climate, and
was discarded along with Wellington boots and leggings. Until recently,
Australian city artists and editors—who knew as much about the bush as
Downing Street knows about the British colonies in general—seemed to
think the horse-collar swag was still in existence; and some artists
gave the swagman a stick, as if he were a tramp of civilization with an
eye on the backyard and a fear of the dog. English artists, by the way,
seem firmly convinced that the Australian bushman is born in Wellington
boots with a polish on 'em you could shave yourself by.

The swag is usually composed of a tent “fly” or strip of calico (a
cover for the swag and a shelter in bad weather—in New Zealand it is
oilcloth or waterproof twill), a couple of blankets, blue by custom and
preference, as that colour shows the dirt less than any other (hence
the name “bluey” for swag), and the core is composed of spare clothing
and small personal effects. To make or “roll up” your swag: lay the fly
or strip of calico on the ground, blueys on top of it; across one end,
with eighteen inches or so to spare, lay your spare trousers and shirt,
folded, light boots tied together by the laces toe to heel, books,
bundle of old letters, portraits, or whatever little knick-knacks you
have or care to carry, bag of needles, thread, pen and ink, spare
patches for your pants, and bootlaces. Lay or arrange the pile so that
it will roll evenly with the swag (some pack the lot in an old
pillowslip or canvas bag), take a fold over of blanket and calico the
whole length on each side, so as to reduce the width of the swag to,
say, three feet, throw the spare end, with an inward fold, over the
little pile of belongings, and then roll the whole to the other end,
using your knees and judgment to make the swag tight, compact and
artistic; when within eighteen inches of the loose end take an inward
fold in that, and bring it up against the body of the swag. There is a
strong suggestion of a roley-poley in a rag about the business, only
the ends of the swag are folded in, in rings, and not 'tied. Fasten the
swag with three or four straps, according to judgment and the supply of
straps. To the top strap, for the swag is carried (and eased down in
shanty bars and against walls or veranda-posts when not on the track)
in a more or less vertical position—to the top strap, and lowest, or
lowest but one, fasten the ends of the shoulder strap (usually a towel
is preferred as being softer to the shoulder), your coat being carried
outside the swag at the back, under the straps. To the top strap fasten
the string of the nose-bag, a calico bag about the size of a
pillowslip, containing the tea, sugar and flour bags, bread, meat,
baking-powder and salt, and brought, when the swag is carried from the
left shoulder, over the right on to the chest, and so balancing the
swag behind. But a swagman can throw a heavy swag in a nearly vertical
position against his spine, slung from one shoulder only and without
any balance, and carry it as easily as you might wear your overcoat.
Some bushmen arrange their belongings so neatly and conveniently, with
swag straps in a sort of harness, that they can roll up the swag in
about a minute, and unbuckle it and throw it out as easily as a roll of
wall-paper, and there's the bed ready on the ground with the wardrobe
for a pillow. The swag is always used for a seat on the track; it is a
soft seat, so trousers last a long time. And, the dust being mostly
soft and silky on the long tracks out back, boots last marvellously.
Fifteen miles a day is the average with the swag, but you must travel
according to the water: if the next bore or tank is five miles on, and
the next twenty beyond, you camp at the five-mile water to-night and do
the twenty next day. But if it's thirty miles you have to do it.
Travelling with the swag in Australia is variously and picturesquely
described as “humping bluey,” “walking Matilda,” “humping Matilda,”
“humping your drum,” “being on the wallaby,” “jabbing trotters,” and
“tea and sugar burglaring,” but most travelling shearers now call
themselves trav'lers, and say simply “on the track,” or “carrying
swag.”

And there you have the Australian swag. Men from all the world have
carried it—lords and low-class Chinamen, saints and world martyrs, and
felons, thieves, and murderers, educated gentlemen and boors who
couldn't sign their mark, gentlemen who fought for Poland and convicts
who fought the world, women, and more than one woman disguised as a
man. The Australian swag has held in its core letters and papers in all
languages, the honour of great houses, and more than one national
secret, papers that would send well-known and highly-respected men to
jail, and proofs of the innocence of men going mad in prisons, life
tragedies and comedies, fortunes and papers that secured titles and
fortunes, and the last pence of lost fortunes, life secrets, portraits
of mothers and dead loves, pictures of fair women, heart-breaking old
letters written long ago by vanished hands, and the pencilled
manuscript of more than one book which will be famous yet.

The weight of the swag varies from the light rouseabout's swag,
containing one blanket and a clean shirt, to the “royal Alfred,” with
tent and all complete, and weighing part of a ton. Some old sundowners
have a mania for gathering, from selectors' and shearers' huts, and
dust-heaps, heart-breaking loads of rubbish which can never be of any
possible use to them or anyone else. Here is an inventory of the
contents of the swag of an old tramp who was found dead on the track,
lying on his face on the sand, with his swag on top of him, and his
arms stretched straight out as if he were embracing the mother earth,
or had made, with his last movement, the sign of the cross to the
blazing heavens:

Rotten old tent in rags. Filthy blue blanket, patched with squares
of red and calico. Half of “white blanket” nearly black now, patched
with pieces of various material and sewn to half of red blanket.
Three-bushel sack slit open. Pieces of sacking. Part of a woman's
skirt. Two rotten old pairs of moleskin trousers. One leg of a pair of
trousers. Back of a shirt. Half a waistcoat. Two tweed coats, green,
old and rotting, and patched with calico. Blanket, etc. Large bundle of
assorted rags for patches, all rotten. Leaky billy-can, containing
fishing-line, papers, suet, needles and cotton, etc. Jam-tin, medicine
bottles, corks on strings, to hang to his hat to keep the flies off (a
sign of madness in the bush, for the corks would madden a sane man
sooner than the flies could). Three boots of different sizes, all
belonging to the right foot, and a left slipper. Coffee-pot, without
handle or spout, and quart-pot full of rubbish—broken knives and
forks, with the handles burnt off, spoons, etc., picked up on
rubbish-heaps; and many rusty nails, to be used as buttons, I suppose.

Broken saw blade, hammer, broken crockery, old pannikins, small
rusty frying-pan without a handle, children's old shoes, many bits of
old bootleather and greenhide, part of yellowback novel, mutilated
English dictionary, grammar and arithmetic book, a ready reckoner, a
cookery book, a bulgy anglo-foreign dictionary, part of a Shakespeare,
book in French and book in German, and a book on etiquette and
courtship. A heavy pair of blucher boots, with uppers parched and
cracked, and soles so patched (patch over patch) with leather, boot
protectors, hoop iron and hobnails that they were about two inches
thick, and the boots weighed over five pounds. (If you don't believe me
go into the Melbourne Museum, where, in a glass case in a place of
honour, you will see a similar, perhaps the same, pair of bluchers
labelled “An example of colonial industry.”) And in the core of the
swag was a sugar-bag tied tightly with a whip-lash, and containing
another old skirt, rolled very tight and fastened with many turns of a
length of clothes-line, which last, I suppose, he carried to hang
himself with if he felt that way. The skirt was rolled round a small
packet of old portraits and almost indecipherable letters—one from a
woman who had evidently been a sensible woman and a widow, and who
stated in the letter that she did not intend to get married again as
she had enough to do already, slavin' her finger-nails off to keep a
family, without having a second husband to keep. And her answer was
“final for good and all,” and it wasn't no use comin' “bungfoodlin'“
round her again. If he did she'd set Satan on to him. “Satan” was a
dog, I suppose.

The letter was addressed to “Dear Bill,” as were others. There were
no envelopes. The letters were addressed from no place in particular,
so there weren't any means of identifying the dead man. The police
buried him under a gum, and a young trooper cut on the tree the words: